Even though organizations strive to reduce the consumption of paper, a huge number of documents are printed everyday within the organizations. People have shown a propensity for reading and working on documents in paper form rather than on a computer screen. According to one estimate, an average office worker in the United States prints approximately 10,000 sheets per year, i.e. approximately 40 pages per working day. Hence, paper remains an important part of the work environment in most organizations, despite the array of options available for reviewing information in electronic form.
With increasing awareness regarding the environmental deterioration caused by the excessive consumption of paper, organizations are striving toward reducing paper consumption and waste, while not putting undue restrictions on documents printing and compromising worker efficiency.
According to one estimate, nearly half of the documents printed in an organization are for one time use only. This estimate applies to non-private documents, namely documents which are amenable to sharing between workers, as well. Examples of such non-private or sharable documents that are usually printed by more than one employee in an organization include emails sent to all employees regarding policies of the organization, quarterly project updates published on the Intranet of the organization, an informative article based on a topic of interest for all employees, policy memoranda, among other examples. Printed copies of these documents are short-lived and can easily be shared. Hence, systems and methods which enable the sharing of documents among people working in proximate locations, while still promoting worker efficiency and independence, are needed.
Presently, sharing and collaboration platforms are available for people who are in geographically different locations for sharing their ideas, reading preferences, and interests, among other topics. Co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/042,217, entitled “Document Sharing Network” and owned by Applicant, discloses systems and methods for physically sharing a hard copy of a document. The systems and methods include presenting to a user a graphical user interface having printing options for printing the document, where the graphical user interface has an input for receiving an indication by the user that the user is willing to share the hard copy of the document, presenting to the user options for defining characteristics of the hard copy of the document in response to receiving the indication, and publishing at least one of the defined characteristics within a profile page of the user.
Even though such sharing and collaboration platforms have enabled improved communication between people throughout the world, there is still a need for an efficient social networking platform which is organization specific and which allows members of an organization to know what other members sitting in the same organizational space are reading, what documents they are amenable to sharing, and to which documents they are providing physical access.
Similarly, conventional electronic file sharing platforms, which enable the sharing of digital documents among people working at separate workstations, also fail to efficiently let people physically share their annotations, comments, highlights in non-editable document format like PDF, TIFF, or scanned copies of paper documents. For many individuals, paper documents remain more useful for detailed and thorough reading, highlighting, making notes, and sharing annotations with fellow knowledge workers. Hence, there is need for an improved collaborative platform for sharing paper documents. Further, many times the behavior of users in their printing is not motivated by environmental concerns. They may select, for example, to print on the closest printer, use default settings, or print a document multiple times during its creation, simply as a matter of convenience. Therefore, there is also a need for a system and method that promotes environment-friendly behavior by users of such devices and actively encourages members of an organization to share their paper documents, so that the number of documents printed in the organization is reduced and the wastage of paper is minimized.